


Sure of the Sea

by historia_vitae_magistras



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2018-11-23 12:28:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11402412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historia_vitae_magistras/pseuds/historia_vitae_magistras
Summary: April 22, 1915: The the first gas attack on the Western Front is launched against French troops at Ypres. French troops flee their first taste of the horror that is modern war. Francis Bonnefoy is caught in the maelstrom.April 24th, 1915: Second Battle of Ypres, Canada enters the First World War against the German Empire. For the first time in history, a colonial force holds their own against a European power. Matthew Williams holds the line and suffers the consequences.April 25th, 1915: Hundreds of miles to the East, Australia and New Zealand enter the war. Landing in force, they forge their identity as independent nations under fire at Gallipoli. Jack and Zee Kirkland hold their lives in each other's hands.May 7th, 1915: A German U-Boat torpedoes the Lusitania, turning American sentiment against the Central Powers. 128 Americans drown in the frigid North Atlantic. Among them is Alfred F. Jones.Or: That one where Canada, America, Australia, and New Zealand are badasses despite all the odds, Francis and Arthur are too old to be fighting this kind of war, and everyone has daddy issues in one trench or another.





	1. Sure of the Sin

  
  
  
  
  
  
“Sure of the sea to send its healing breeze,

Sure of the sun, and even as to these

Surely the Spring, when God shall please,

Will come again like a divine surprise.”

-From Charlotte Mew’s, “May 1915.”

* * *

 

 

All around him, dead men walk.

Their faces, or what he can see under the smeared black of burns and filth, are slack and blank with exhaustion. They do not march anymore but surge forward in a wave of human pity. Those with all limbs intact bear those who cannot stand between them, on stretchers. Comrades cling together. A man with bandaged eyes gripping the belt of a sad soul clutching his bloody arm. A man with a bandaged head, another with a bloodied throat, with their limping friend supported between them. Columns of men with pus-soaked bandages around their eyes clinging to the back of the uniform of the man in front of them. Hundreds of them like this, surging onto the road.

The walking wounded make their way faster than the poor bastards in the waggons and lorries, who must stop for gravel and sand to be poured beneath their wheels and shoved forward again as they become mired in mud. He's seen more than one nurse among the orderlies, with her face smeared with grime and her skirt kilted up, forcing the waggons along.

They are Francis' boys. Some are as pale, and as wide-eyed as Francis, himself bled white with their wounds. Others are ashen underneath their golden skin; their eyes squeezed shut against the pain. Still, more are men with dark faces in sky-blue tirailleur uniforms. They've lost their Zouave caps, but there is still plenty of red in their matted and hardened clothing as it grates against inflamed and oozing wounds. He hears French; tinged with Vietnamese, Berber, and Arabic—every accent from every corner of France's second-rate empire—but they all cry out in that same fucking French that Matthew whimpers in when he's drunk and half-asleep or doesn't know someone is listening.

Arthur presses his horse through the tide of human bodies. As far as warhorses go, Skylla is a pathetic excuse for a mount. She fights the bridle, rears to the side, refuses to charge head-on into the wave of human bodies, even as he brought the crop down on her flank.

Arthur urges her forward. He does not apologise. He does not care.

A man o'war he could have steered anywhere he pleased with the wind at his back because ships do not whinny and complain when directed into unfriendly waters. But Skylla is not a galleon or even a schooner: she is a horse. And not even a proper warhorse at that. She is a gentle riding mare, bred and trained to gently carry a delicate English Lady through a quiet ride through the eiderdowns, and Arthur steers her on like a ship against the current.

Dimly, he wonders what fool lord's wife named this poor creature for one of the eight immortal horses that drew Poseidon's chariot. Pity rides the thoughts coattails, and he raises his hand to stroke her mane. The urge is lost as quickly as it comes, as a flash of a red cross on a white field drags his gaze left. On the edge of the river of human waste and the paludal filth of horse shit and ever-churning mud where there once was a road, there is an ambulance waggon with its front corner so low it nearly touches the ground.

He wheels Skylla around and smells roses. The reins snap tight. He freezes. In the reek of the thousands of unwashed bodies, the coppery rot of the wounded and the constant damp of Belgian soil there are flowers. No, not just flowers. Christ. Of all things, the fragrance of fucking roses wafting over the reek of it all, gripping him.

He urges Skylla into the path of the ambulance. He ignores the weak cries and complaints of the unwashed mass as he cuts through the crowd, smiling in spite of himself. Warmth, of the sort only champagne brings, fills his belly. His blood is up and singing the way a sword does when drawn to a spinning whetstone. It's not the robust, fresh scent of his tea roses, but the gentler redolence of myrrh, plums, and a lover's satisfied smile.

Skylla brays her complaints, but Arthur pushes her onwards, cracking his crop against her hide once more. When he passes the bulk of the crowd, he leaps from her back and shoves her reins into the hand of an exhausted orderly with orders not to move from the spot.

He steps onto the hitch of the ambulance waggon, lifts himself over and flings the stained canvas cover aside. There, among a score of wounded, Francis lies in repose: on his back, half naked and the fly of his pants wide open, his most favourite state of undress. He lies on the floor of the waggon with only straw between him and the planks. Down the V between his hips, he clutches a bundle of red and white cloth on his belly.

Arthur takes in the sight of it with a raised eyebrow. “Had another cock-up, have you?”

“Ah, Bonjour to you as well, Angleterre.” Francis returns, but it lacks any of his usual airy nonchalance. His jaw trembles in pain: he bites down. A little more blood and he won't have a white shirt to wave the next time he fancies surrender.

Arthur steps over a man and squats until his boot heels press into the back of his thighs. He lifts the edge of the shirt and blood floods up to meet him.

“Bordel de Merde! Don’t! I just managed to put everything back in!” The last of the colour in Francis’ face fades away until he is grey. He scrambles to apply pressure again, but his heart still pumps blood, and it oozes right between his fingers.

Arthur grimaces and pushes at the legs of the wounded man next to Francis to make room. His brow furrows as blood flowed over Francis’ hands as they white knuckled the shirt.

Francis lets out a stuttering groan from between his clenched teeth. “Nom de Dieu, I’m still bleeding.”

Arthur grits his teeth and very nearly rolls his eyes. “Very perceptive of you. Next, you’ll be telling me the sky is blue, and water is indeed, wet.”

Francis doesn't respond, only tightens his grip on his belly and moans.

“What the hell happened to you?” Arthur huffs and pretends there isn’t a half smile trying to catch and pull the corner of his mouth up. There’s still a darker part of him that immensely enjoys the sight of Francis in pain.

“Shrapnel,” grunts Francis, jaw trembling as he fights to keep control of himself.

England's hand ghosts over his brow. He doesn't need to touch Francis to feel the sticky heat of infection rolling off him. He catches the frown that his face wants to make just before he makes it. Francis isn't paying attention, or he would have caught it. His children, the sea, his daily cuppa and the image of Francis in pain, they have all been ruined by this war. Yes, the sight of Francis on his back could still be gleeful, but it's a hollow delight, knowing that it was a bit of kraut shrapnel rather than his own sword. Arthur squeezes his eyes shut, pinches the bridge of his nose. His face softens, and he leaves his hand at Francis’ temple.

“Right, well, at least it wasn’t your head this time.”

The sniper’s shot had been clean. Right through the temple, the very day the dumb bastard had finally retired his garish peacetime uniform for drab horizon-blue. Three days and all the way back to Paris he had held Francis’ skull together in his hands, thinking about the way his hair had caught the morning sun as they stood on the parapet for a roll call. Ludwig was many things, but a bad shot was not one of them.

Francis turns on his side with a grunt of agreement, curling up around his wounded belly with his bare back to Arthur. There are cuts, scabbed-over and black, all along the length of his backside. Long bands torn from his shoulder blades and further down, from the small of his back, spots where the shrapnel has scraped away the skin in shorter, shallower strips.

Arthur runs a hand down his face, dragging his nails through his hair. "What in the blooming hell happened to you?" Christ, wherever he's abandoned his coat, it must have been shredded. Francis is a sight: bloodied, half dead and half naked in a broken-down hospital waggon.

“Where are they taking you anyway? Dressing station?”

“J'en ai plus rien à foutre,” Francis growls. Arthur’s brows shot upward. It'll be a nippy day in hell or a sunny day in London when Francis doesn't care. Francis shudders, his hands pressing into the cloth until the back of his hands disappears into the red.

Arthur lowers his voice, and responds in his best, but still uncertain, French. “Anyone, ah, serviced you?”

Francis bites off another pained sound and blows the stray curls from his face. His hair is unwashed and limp with sweat and filth, having mostly escaped the ribbon at the back of his head. Makes him look like a right pitiful Papillon Spaniel that somebody left in the rain. Then he shifts, and the effect is lost in an ugly sneer across his face. Pain has always made Francis more angry than weak. It shades his eyes for a moment as he speaks.

“Must you still attempt to speak French? Those crooked teeth of yours butcher it as badly as the barber does your hair, my god.”

Arthur grits his teeth. “You know what I mean.”

“Oui, yes. And as much as I appreciate the offer, I might remind you we’re in an ambulance, not a bordello,” Francis snips, and barely manages to finish his sentence before his whole body shudders, and he rides out another wave of pain.

Glad that his face is filthy enough that Francis can't possibly see the heat in his cheeks, Arthur sits forward, his knees hitting the wood floor.

“Alright, fuck. Where’s the goddamn nurse?” He reaches for the cloth piled over the wound and tugs it out from under Francis’ white-knuckle grip.

“Merde! I don’t know. Stop tugging at that; I’ve lost quite enough blood thank you!” Francis bats at his hands, but it is a weak effort. Arthur only has to smack him once and roll his eyes before Francis gives up and allows Arthur to pull the cloth away. Blood bubbles up to meet him. He cups his hand and drags it across the curve of Francis' belly, smearing away the ichor to get a better look. His hand comes away scarlet, but for a moment he has a glimpse of the wound underneath.

“Sweet baby Jesus was a brasser!” His stomach turns at the sight. Vaguely, he hopes the Mother of God hasn’t turned her face from the ugly sight beneath his hands. There is a slash splitting Francis’ belly like the Seine cleaves its way through Paris. One gaping rift where Francis must have taken a piece of shrapnel the size of an axe blade. Then there is a length of skin and muscle just missing. He replaces the shirt, with no white left in it now; only red and brown with black streaks. Blood, dried blood and filth. It's saturated. Arthur stares down at his hands, slick with hot blood that smears yellow when he wipes his hands on the flare of his trousers. That is when he knows what's happened. That much piss yellow bile in the blood has only one meaning. Francis has nicked an artery and his goddamn intestine.

“Poxy, cack-handed shyte, all mouth and no trousers as usual." He rattles off his insults over the pit of his stomach dropping. "You’re lucky it was your belly and not your balls! God knows they could use a proper draining. They must be as blue as your uniform with all your girls having their wicked, papist ways with my lads.”

France's eyes flicker up at the note of uncertainty under the bluster. And for a moment, his eyes are as wide and blue as Matthew’s. He looks up, confused and questioning under the haze of blood loss and agony. Arthur meets his gaze and something that feels like pity and bile rises in his throat. He rakes a hand through his hair and shakes his head. Francis heaves a deep breath and steels himself, lying down flat again.

He squeezes his eyes shut.

For the first time, Arthur gets a good look at him. He’s haggard in a ragged way Francis has never been. No elegance, no perfume, no swagger. Just agony and sweat pours down his damp face. War’s never come quite as easy for Francis as it has for the rest of them. He’s always made up for it with endless energy and reluctant courage as the handsome face of Europe’s joie de vivre.

If Ludwig wants to bleed France to death to win the war, he is succeeding. Francis is the colour of the centre third of his flag. Ludwig is succeeding. He's shot away the belly of France itself. The little Hun upstart that had hid behind his brother’s coat tails for the last century is succeeding.

He rakes his hand through his hair. The little kraut cunt. They should have slit his throat while he was small and in swaddled in his brother’s arms.

“Angleterre?” Francis says. His voice isn’t champagne now. For all the smell of roses pouring off him, there’s still the sour smell of piss and injury underneath.

“Yes?” He says absently. God, the reek of Francis reminds him of when they didn’t bathe so much as douse themselves in more perfume, but with the coppery rotten scent of French blood over it all. Arthur’s face twists.

“I think— I think something needs to be done about this?” Francis gestured down at the wreck of his torso.

“Right, yes,” He looks everywhere but at Francis as he unbuckles his belt. When it's free, he folds it in two and offers it to Francis.

Francis' face smooths as if he’s about to laugh. “Now is really not the time for your rather specific... ah... what is the word? Interests?”

Arthur jerks his hands out again, belt spanned between it and gestures more forcefully. Francis smacks it away.

“I’m not a fucking horse.” The pain must recede just long enough for Francis to push himself up on his elbows and arrange his face into a withering glare.

Arthur opens his face up, raises his brow in a face that is as close to pleading as he can manage. “Trust me, Frog, you’re going to want to bite down on this.”

Francis recoils, furious.“Have you finally gone deaf? I said I’m not a horse. I don’t need a fucking bit!”

“Suit yourself.” Arthur shrugs a shoulder and rolls up his sleeves. Satisfied, Francis nodded and laid back. As soon as he is settled and looks as comfortable as a man torn to shreds can be, Arthur acts.

The flat of his palm came down hard on Francis’ wounded belly with a resounding and all to wet slap. Francis’ screamed like a woman in childbirth, his voice breaking as he hit an octave that would make hunting dog’s whine. Then it was cut off to nothing by a faint, sorry sounding gurgle.

“Right, was that about you being a horse?” He let Francis spit blood before he offered the belt again. Francis looked up.

“That was cruel, Angleterre. Even for you, that was cruel.” Now he does have the enraged, ashamed, obedient look of a wild horse newly broken in. Arthur gives him a breezy, hollow mockery of a grin.

“Oh, do shut up.” He says and stuffs the flats of the folded belt between Francis’ teeth. Francis gags once, but lays back with a nod.

Arthur shrugs off his jacket and lays it over Francis’ chest and face. As he draws it up, Francis pulls up an arched brow, questioning him.

“You’re not going to want to watch this.”  It’s only a half truth. He won’t want to watch Arthur work, but more so, Arthur doesn’t want to watch Francis’ face as he does what he must in the depths of Francis’ belly. When he looks Francis in the face, the exhaustion-dull blue eyes flickers with understanding. Francis has always known something about the strange little isle across the channel that the rest of the continent does not. Arthur looks away. He's never liked that look in Francis. That 'I know you, and I understand' that his eyes have always spoken. He only sees Francis nod his understanding and his consent from the corner of his eye.

He goes still as Arthur brings up the coat. Francis is so still, he is the corpse of a dutiful soldier being respectfully covered by his comrades. This even has he is silent enough to be a tropical bird with a curtain over it’s gilded cage.

Either way, Francis cannot be the body he sets out to work on. Arthur sits back on his heels again and plucked his hips flask from his pocket. He removes the shirt and douses his hands and the gaping belly in front of him as best he can, hoping he at least won’t add to the raging infection. The flask up ends, and he knocks back the rest. Rum hits his empty stomach and courage and bile rise in his gorge. One last check to make sure his shirt sleeves are high enough. He inhales, steadies himself, pinches the wound open and as blood rushes someone, plunges his hand in.

God, he hates shrapnel. Every time a shell hits, it's like the lorry backfiring with all the force of God's revolver at your temple. All the less personal and all the more rattling for it. The shells rain down, and everyone hits the duckboards or flings themselves into the walls of the trench, praying that mother earth and the holy father will let them keep their intestines this time. But somebody always gets hit. There's always remains, not corpses. Corpses are men. And when the bombs fall, and somebody dies, whatever's left, if there’s anything left at all, isn't man.

His eyes close. He wasn't there this particular shelling, but he knows what it must have looked like. One moment, there is Francis, his voice raised in some double-entendre, with a lewd smile Arthur would recognise anywhere, even under the mud. He is laughing, mid-breath, showing all of the whites of his teeth.. And the next moment, there is a body, impaled, red seeping into blue, a mouth open in a howl, joke forgotten.

And it is not Francis anymore.

Arthur reaches deep inside, his hand an arrowhead through shredded flesh. His wrists disappear into the maw of the gap. He parts muscles and nerves, drives through the red pouring hell fountain. The hepatic portal vein: he's seen it on the charts. The body is muscle, not blonde, not pale, not a friend, not a foe and he will not let it be Francis. They aren't quite things that last forever but God, all the blood. Blood makes even them look like fleeting, fleshy men. And that is all that can be around his hand. He is only a man. He can only be a stranger pouring himself out upon Arthur's lap.

He comes down hard with certain fingers in a blind search for the shredded vein. He's seen what he's aiming for before, in his own body. The civil war had rendered him nearly in half, back when canons still shot iron instead of steel. A shot had burst just in front of him. Taken out everything hip to hip and navel to sternum. It’d missed his heart but shredded the largest vein in his gut. He hadn’t known the name of it then, only that he had to pinch it off and burn what was left of himself shut. Men who bled were dead.

The nursery rhyme applied even to them, creatures who were half ideas, half men. They died like men, but were as hard to kill as ideas themselves. Put the idea of one of them down and they would spring to life again, utterly changed but startlingly similar. Only ideas themselves didn't bleed. And God, does Francis ever bleed.

Better to think of himself rendered asunder than pretty, cultured Francis. Slippery, gamey flesh separates. He’s nearly there. It's only to the right of the third cut of meat. Just above the gallbladder. He separates his fingers, feels around. Inside, it’s the string and slime of a hot, half cooked gourd. His fingers glide across the round of the gall bladder and then there’s a rubbery length where he can feel fluid rushing. He gets his hand around it and—

Ah! There it is! Gets a firm grip about it and then winds it around his forefinger, twisting and pinching it off. As soon as he does, the bleeding slows to near nothing at all. With his other hand, Arthur swipes at the hair falling in his eyes and sighs. Now all that's left is to bind it off and all will be well. He can feel Francis’ heartbeat racing away through the artery in his hand. It’s too fast, but it's strong.

He pulls the jacket away from his face. Francis is silent and the waxy pale of a man already dead. But his chest rises and falls with the intake of breath and his eyes are open and glassy like the blue marbles Matthew used to play with in the yard. His forearm is half-deep inside Francis still, his fingers are the only thing keeping him from bleeding out.

“You know, when I say I want to be inside of you this isn’t quite what I mean,” Arthur chuckles. And he means it. Gore fuels the thought, yes, but also the memories of his favourite pleasant days on the green fields near the Straights of Dover. Over the years, it had always been Francis' ideal place. It was the only place in England where when the sun was high and the channel mists dispersed, you could see straight across to Calais. And that is where Francis always glanced when Arthur was deep inside him. Arthur looked down at blond hair and a scarred back, but Francis always looked home. For as much as there was between them, the foreign land was still just that. Foreign.   

His voice lilts on the lewd thought. If nothing else, that should get a rise from the man lying under him,

Francis is silent, staring beyond Arthur. His eyes are a dead, dilated, and flat.

“Francis?”

He doesn’t answer, his gaze holds steady to the stained and weather-beaten canvas. There is only silence, save for the low, pathetic groaning of the wounded around them. Francis’ chapped, bloodless lips move to form words, but nothing comes out. His skin is pulled taut in pain and oddly translucent under the rivulets of sweat pouring down his face, as if his flesh is only a thin layer of wax over his skull.

“Francis— Francis for fuck’s sakes.” He needs something to tie off the artery and the drooping blue bit of ribbon as it barely clings to a loose curl over Francis’ shoulder would do nicely. It's just out of reach, beyond what he could grab without opening Francis up further.

Arthur huffs, summons his best French, and tugs a little on the fistful of artery. "Francis? Réveille-toi, Branleur!”

“Angleterre?” Francis shudders, blinking.

“There you are. Bonjour! Now be a dear and give me your ribbon.”

“My...?” Francis lifts a weak hand to the back of his head.

“The bloody ribbon, yes. Hand it over. I’d grab it myself but I’m currently holding your fucking guts.”

“Ah, oui.” He fumbles for it, but hands over the scrap of blue silk. Not quite as good as catgut for stitches, but it'll do. He takes it between the first two fingers of his free hand and follows the path of his other arm down, keeping his nails carefully angled against his arm as to not catch anything else that could bleed. Steam rises and the metallic stink surges upward with it. Arthur might have gagged, but he'd lost the reflex right around the second bout of Bubonic Plague. When his fingers finally push through the slippery, gelatinous mess to meet his other hand, he loops the ribbon around, pushes down one end and then yanks the knot closed. He extracts his hands then and sits back. It's done. He’s done. Francis’ heart still beats in his chest.

He gets to his feet then, not sparing Francis another glance. The fresh air that greets him is a rush of breath he’s barely allowed himself since he’d crawled next to Francis. His bloodied hands leave prints as he climbs out of the wagon. From his fingertips to above his elbow, his arms are brown with coagulated blood, the bottoms of his pushed up sleeves crusting black now as the ichor dries. When he’s on the ground, he collapses into the gravel. His chest is tight suddenly.

He’ll never have to do that again. He’ll never have to do that again. He’ll never have to do that again. It's a bald faced lie, and he knows it, but it’ll have to do for now. Francis looks too much like Matthew when he’s in pain. He’s known Francis for a thousand years, watched generations rise and grow old and dynasties and republics and empires ebb and flow with the tides. All the while, Francis had been just there, on the other side of the channel. But when Francis is in pain and the fury and bravado subsides, his face doesn’t look like his anymore, but Matthews.

Matthew had gotten more than his language. He’d gotten his eyes and his hair and perhaps the boy’s instinct for gentleness was Francis’ too. Though in Francis he hadn’t seen it since before Rome had pulled away. But looking like that, he doesn’t see Francis the man, but Matthew the boy, younger than he is now. He sees Matthew in pain, with eyes too big and young and sweet to belong to anyone who spoke French of all fucking languages.

He heaves a sigh, and gets to his feet. He wants to say he misses Matthew. But it’s never Matthew’s letters that sooth the pit in his stomach away, but those from the American ambassador. He goes to pinch his nose but remembers himself just in time. He needs to clean up. He walks to where he left the orderly holding Skylla with his arms outstretched in front of him. The orderly must be fresh arrival. He eyes Arthur’s arms with trepidation and it’s not until he feels the inevitable sense of patriotism that he helps Arthur pluck one of his canteens from the saddlebags and scrub away the filth.

When his hands are as close to clean as they’re going to get, he gathers up the clothes and puttees he was going to change into and a second canteen and returns to Francis. When he’s kneeling again, Francis is out, but he looks like Francis again, not their son.

He strips Francis down to his skivvies and it takes longer than it should, as he’s only removing boots and pants. But the going is slow when every movement pulls at the gaping wound still trickling blood. Francis isn’t too much bigger that the green expeditionary trousers don’t fit, but his hips are wider than Arthur’s and the pants can’t be buttoned. Just as well. Francis always way happiest with his fly unbuttoned.

He snorts and upends half the canteen onto the shirt, and spills some on Francis in the process. That wakes him. He doesn’t bother to raise himself up on his elbows this time.

“Where are my pants?”

“They’re flammable, and right now, you’re bunged up enough.”

“What? Angleterre—”

“Quit your whingeing, I’ll be quick.”

He draws his revolver and spins open the chamber.

“There we are,” he says, as he picks out a bullet.

Francis looks up, alarmed; his face pallid and his eyes much too young and too blue. He opens his mouth to complain complain, but Arthur has already bitten the bullet in two, upending the mix of phosphorus and gunpowder into the wound. He feels panicked hands fluttering around his own, his eyes flickered everywhere but his face. Arthur looks him in the eye for a moment and drags a match along his boot.

“Angl—Angleterre— what are you-”

He shields the spark in his hand for a moment, and when the flame steadies, he drops it.

There’s a flash. A ghost of blue fire against blackening flesh. But the smell, the fucking smell of it fills him, carries him back to dark days long ago. Burning roses, pitch and tar, torches and a woman wailing on the pyre. The stink of fire on flesh and Christ it's Jeanne at the stake all over again. He presses the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. He’d set fire to the woman. He’d sheared Jeanne d'Arc like a sheep because he could not reach Francis and do it to him. It had failed to bring joy to him then and it failed to bring to bring him joy him now.

Francis’ skin bubbles. When the burn is deep enough to close everything, Arthur presses the wet cloth to Francis’ mangled belly and smothers the flames. He just catches Francis by the wrists as he jack-knifes, curling around himself to protect his belly. He only lets go when a howl threatens to tear Francis’ jaw from his skull. Arthur shakes himself and looks away, rubbing fitfully at his eyes. He can't watch this. Francis wouldn't want him to. Instead, he focuses in on the burn working its way into the layers of skin and muscle. When he blinks away the spots from the flames in his vision, he finds himself staring a charred, ghoulish belly. But one that no longer bleeds.

“Alright, that should do you.” he says, laying the sopping mess of a shirt back over the wound as Frances howls anew at the contact. And this time around, when he falls silent, so does the rest of the wagon. Arthur looks around. Men who had seized up at the sound of their nation’s pain, now lie quiet and still. No moaning, no twitching.

“What in the-”

Scrambling over, he jams his fingers into the collar bone of a boy with puss-soaked bandages over his eyes. No pulse. The boy’s head lolls and falls away. Arthur flinches, sat back. The shockwave of his howling must have done them in. He swallows and turns back to Francis.

“They’ll uh, take you to the dressing station. In the green, no one should say anything. The nurses are used to the French-Canadians babbling in that whore tongue of yours so there should be a nurse or two who speaks French. I’ll give them orders for you to be specialed, and I’ll get Matthew and his boys to the front. That should keep Beilschmidt on his back foot for a bit until you're up and about again, Frog. How's tomorrow sound, eh? Bright and early.”

The sound of Francis still rings in his ears like a bell, so powerful that he almost doesn't hear the man when he begins muttering, frantically, the name of their son.

“Angleterre- Angleterre, Matthew!”

“What?”

He can see the whites of his eyes. He can see nothing but the whites of his eyes. “The First Canadian was holding the line when we fell back-”

"What are you-"

"Matthew! He’s already there."


	2. Sure of the Sky

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


* * *

  
Matt doesn't sleep when they're at the forward line. Not a man gets any real rest between the stink and the snipers, but Matt sleeps less than anyone, kept up by the occasional bomb, woken by the beating hearts of his soldiers when they suddenly stop. He’s given up on sleep and kneels down into the mud. Grimacing at the shock of the slimey earth seeping through his trousers, he plants himself firmly before he turns up the oil lanter and balances an ammo can on his knee for a makeshift worktop.

Arthur’s mail keeps being delivered to him rather than the British Expeditionary Force headquarters. He, who has never even been permitted the family name, is supposed to file and reply to Kirkland mail like he's some redtab orderly instead of a forward combat officer. Most of it's postmarked from London or Hong Kong. Most he forwards on to his father; he's not about to risk being cracked down a rank if he answers without consulting him first. There's one from the Netherlands, a Johan van Schipper. He remembers him only dimly from the Beaver Wars, when he was still young and clinging to the name of New France. He turns the letter over in his hands to where it is blank. On the back of the letter addressed to his father in theory, but delegated and entrusted to him, he begins to draw Belgium as he had last saw her. He conjurs her as he last saw her, depicts her bright pillar candle of a face in paper and fills in the murk of the mud with the chunk of pencil he'd snagged from somewhere and kept in his pocket for the rare occasions he had paper that wouldn't disintegrate into the mud.

When he'd last laid eyes on Margaux, she'd been perched on the ladder to go over the top, one boot in the mud and one on the first step; hair loose and facing forward, staring out and up, her face almost a cameo. But instead of bone set in onyx, his bright against a background of dark is that of flesh against mud. He draws her face by the leaving the pale space of the paper plain and scribbling in her dark background with the pen. Her staring beyond the front line to the German trenches, face hardened into a stoic half-snarl. In soft, faint lines, he turns the fluid shapes and rounded corners into the image of her face, hair, and eyes; the layers upon layers of soft strokes turn into features.

He smiles down at his work when it's finished.

It's hardly what might be called talent and surely she has been painted by far greater masters, but when he writes 'Belgian Resistance—1915" on the bottom, he almost signs it Matthieu Marc Jean-Luc Bonnefoy. He holds the pencil white-knuckled for a moment, and the urge to mark his work passes. He hasn't borne an artists name in so long and something about Williams doesn't ring when he tries to imagine it in the corner of the portrait. No matter, he's done his duty in his way. He wonders what Johan will think of his answer. He hopes it's reassuring, if nothing else. He folds it up, sends it off with the rest of the mail, tries to curl up in the officers bunker as dawn approaches. But the bed, made up of planks lifted just off the mud, are made for a shorter man. Tossing and turning, he gives up an hour before dawn and ends up back on the firing line just in time for the morning hate. The men stand-to and Matt waves his permission. The air explodes with the the clattering banging of the machine guns and the deafening din of angry, tense men exploding into fury. Matt yawns.

Only meters away, the Germans do the same, firing off potshots, machine guns screaming, a few artillery shells raining down. And then all falls quiet. The men are tense, Matt’s hand rests on his pistol. He's watched the Germans surge over and down before so many ants coming for the picnic crumbs of Belgium. If they are going to attack today, it is now. He listens and with his borrowed rifle watches the horizon with a practiced hunter’s eyes. It is strange to be searching for man rather than animals, but nothing comes.

He lets go of his pistol and waves the men into their chores. Sandbags to fill and planks to lay,, rifles to clean. Lunch is cold as per usual, like tins of cat vomit and then, finally, after tea, he curls up on his plank in the dugout for a nap and dreams of his prairies. Gold fields that shimmer silver in the breeze, farm houses neatly whitewashed but nearly weary against the lowering sun. He wakes up peaceful, if a little disappointed to be in Belgium once more . He puts on his cap, straightens out and rejoins the world up front, leans against the parapet as the Sergeant gives his report. He doesn’t really listen. European soil gives way under his hand. Rich soil, fertilised for generations and generations. This should be a place for farms and forest, full of wheat and wildlife. He’s grateful suddenly that he’s not in France. That it isn't French soil in his hand. That would be too much to bear.

He can hardly focus as it is.

The Sergeant finishes his report and Matt knows the man thinks he's a a dreamer. And he is, with his books and his French and— something’s wrong.

The order to man the firing line rings from him before he can think. Something— he can feel it, sour and unsure in his belly. The French contingency is on their flanks. And he can feel his Papa there, in pain. He grits his teeth, watches the line through his rifle sites. The Germans are quiet today. And good, because is mind is so loud with memories, able to feel Francis so close. He tries to call him Capitaine or Monsieur Bonnefoy. But all that rings in his head is Papa, Papa, Papa. Focus Matthew, he thinks. Watch the line. Be loyal, be quiet, be where you are needed, be where you can help. Be useful. Be useful. Be good.

If his nation has so little to give, he can give all of himself.

The shells begin to fall. Booming and terrible, God's fury raging down on men who dared to doubt His existence. Matt covers his ears for a moment but then he remembers himself. He keeps his grip on his rifle. Keeps his eye against his rifle scope, and thanks God he doesn't wear spectacles like Alfred.

The earth churns under him like Francis is trying to spit him out, leave him without shelter again. Everything is deafening and his hands shake as hard as the parapet does underneath him, but he holds on. He holds on. Please, Please God. Keep me whole— when the fury is passed, the Germans will come and he needs just a moment more. Because he can do something against men. But he cannot bayonet bombs. Just a moment longer.

And just like that, they end. Matt braces, shoulders his rifle, takes aim, and makes ready to face the enemy. The fog is strange in France. In the distance, it clings to the earth, brings with it the aroma of fruit and fresh pepper. Matt stares out, down the length of his rifles scope and tries to keep a look out for any shadows as it rolls in. Things the shape of men begin to move through the mist, uttering high, thin, terrible cries. Matt holds the trigger. The light makes it such an odd green colour here. Something creeps into him, runs down his back. The angle is wrong. They're not coming out of the German trenches; they're coming from the north. They rip through the lines and there is a rippling cry of horror from his men, as these strange soldiers move towards them en masse. Matt lowers his rifle, turns to the man next to him and orders him to keep his eyes on the line, he ducks down from the firing and pushes forward into the throng. These soldiers are not German. They're French. One stumbles toward him, foaming at the mouth, his dark skin an ashen gray against the bright blue uniform of the Tirailleurs Senegalais. He falls forward, grasping, and catches Matt by the lapels. His men gasp like a bunch of shocked old women. Matt frowns, clasping the man’s hands. “What is it? What’s happened?” he asks, hoping his accent isn't so awful that the man won't understand.

“Gaaaaas,” The man moans. “Gaaaaas,”

Matthew grips him tighter. “What do you mean?”

“Gaaaaaas. Please,” Then the Tirailleurs’ hands are in his blue pockets. He withdraws a pay book and a picture. A woman with high cheekbones and a light coloured head wrap holding a pudgy, full cheeked baby that can’t be older than a year. “My wife and son, Please…” The Tirailleur coughs, expelling more foam from his mouth, wiping desperately at his mouth. He opens it to speak again, but all that comes out is blood.

“You can tell them yourself, mate!” Matt says, gripping viciously at the man's coat. The man mutters something in a language Matthew does not understand, neither English nor French.

“Medic!” he roars over the din. “Get me a fucking medic!”

The man shakes his head, his legs give way and his full weight takes them both down into the mud. Matt scrambles for the photo and the book. The Tirailleur shakes like a man drowning, veins in his throat so desperate for oxygen they nearly pull through their skin— and this Tirailleur— He’s drowning without a lick of water in spitting distance. Matt grips him by the tunic. Shouts, but there is no response. And then he is still—

The Tirailleur is as dead as Matt’s grip is tight. He stands, suddenly cold and shoving the paybook and photograph into his pocket, he screams, “Runner! Get me a fucking runner!” The crowd of frightened soldiers parts. A thin man emerges. “Oh! So you can find me a runner but you can’t find a dying man a fucking medic?” he roars furiously. “Asses on the firing line! Rifles up! If it’s not wearing blue, it’s fucking dead! No exceptions!”

“But, sir—” The Sergeant protests. “The—”

“Did I fucking stutter?” Matt snarls. If it is what the Tirailleur said it was, it would be heavier than air. The higher up they are, the better. He draws himself up to his full height, cut the outer edge of one hand at the parapet directing his men. “I want every fucking pair of boots we have on that fucking fire step!”

“Yes, sir!” The Sergeant nods. “You heard the man! On the fire step, boys!”

Matt wipes his mouth, breath coming fast. “Runner!”

“Sir!”

“Message to headquarters. Tell them to bring every available fucking man to the front trenches. Cooks, engineers, the messenger corps.”

“The messenger corps, sir?”

“Do you not speak English, Private Woods?”

“Sir?” The boy frowns, taken aback. “Have we met?”

“I know every face in this fucking army. And yes, the messenger corps too. Tell them to bring the bloody pigeons if they like. I don't fucking care! We need every spare man they can scrounge. The French are falling back.”

“Sir—” The runner salutes, pulls off his tunic, pushing up his sleeves. “Is that all sir?”

“Tell them— tell them we are the only fucking thing between the Krauts and the rest of France!”

“Sir!”

“And if— if they won't listen to a colonial, you tell them Kirkland ordered it. And get a message to Kirkland about this. And for the love of God—” Matt tears off his cap, scrapes his nails into his scalp and pushes his hair back. “Tell them to send help,”

The runner takes off., Matt turns to the Sergeant again. “Everyone on the firing step, no one backs down. They’re dead if they step down, do you hear me?” He takes to the firing line, pistol in hand. Watches his men follow him up. Every pair of boots and shoulder to shoulder, they swell to fill the line., but not far enough. Matthew orders them to spread out

Another man salutes. “Sir!”

“What?” Matt demands sharply.

“The Enemy is advancing to our left, sir. Command has given permission to withdraw.”

Down in the communication trenches, the gas will choke them.

“We stay,” he says. “We stay, and we hold the line, no exceptions,”

“Sir! They will outflank us from the north if the French have—”

“No,” he snarls. “C and E Company will follow me when they've arrived. We’re taking over the French positions,” He shoulders his rifle, ducks his head down and takes off for the north. He can’t run on the firing line. He can’t breathe on the duckboards.

But Papa is north. There he is, warm as a bottle of wine in Matt’s belly.

So he doesn’t breathe.

Familiar and familial and oh, it hurts to feel it again. The way is lined with the dead and the dying. Matt drops his canteen and bandages where he can, but he doesn’t stop. He apologises, begs their forgiveness, but doesn’t stop.

After a few hundred yards, he starts to feel it, something eating him away faster than even their kind can heal. He listed against the parados, vomiting green sludge and bloody chunks between his boots, blotchy like sheep's lung, like...

“Oh Christ,” he mutters. “Oh sweet Christ, help me,”

He falls down into the mud, into the mist where there was no air. He dreams of lilies and roses and brothers and fathers, fathers, fathers. And then he is gone.

“You alive, sir?” The medic shakes him, peering down at him over the top of a thickly padded surgeon’s mask. Matt can only see blurs and whorls as he chokes and spits more of his insides and sits up, touching his face.

One fingertip to the temple and the medic smacks his hands away, pouring something on his face. It feels like acid on his skin at first, burning and terrible. He grits his teeth and utters a noise and then—it eases.. He reaches for his face and it— oh this is bad. But not unworkable. He can see a little now.

“Yes,” he mutters. “I’m alive,”

“Come on sir, we have to get to the rear. The Germans are on their—”

“No they aren’t,” he says. “Not if I—” He chokes again, more slime works its way up.Matt bites down, and good God, the blood that fills the inside of his mouth tastes better than what he’s vomiting. It bursts up his throat and he can smell it as well as he can taste it: sour raw meat.

He hasn’t had a meat ration since London. That's his own—

It come out of him then, all over the ground. The medic pat him on the back, pressed a wet pad over his nose and mouth and hooks it behind his ears. It’s better than nothing. Makes the air hurt a little less. “We hold the line,” Matt gasps. “We hold the fucking line. Get me the sergeant and as much of that…” He waved at the jug. “As… much of of that as you can find and you tell them to hold the fucking line.”

“Yes sir,” The medic said. “But you can be evacuated on the way,”

Matt shakes his head. “No. I’m staying,” He pulls himself up to his feet, gasping. Something is wrong. Something is horrendously wrong. He forces himself back upright. “Tell them I say stay put. Canada is here to hold the fucking line. We’re holding the fucking line. Send word to the second British to our right. Tell Kirkland…” His vision falters, he sinks against the parados again. “Tell Kirkland that his—” He can’t get any fucking air. “That his son, is looking for France,”

“Sir,” The medic looks at him strangely as he steadies him. “You really should—”

“Go." Matt orders him. “Go!"

The medic hesitates, their eyes meet and he regurgitates the order and takes off at a run. Matt turns his attention inward. He can feel Francis glowing white hot with pain to his north. Its dizzying, and so stupidly familiar, Matt almost cries with relief rather than agony. He wants French soil to cover him.

When he was still a boy in breeching gowns, so little and so dependent on France, this pain belonged to both of them. With every outbreak of smallpox in Normandy, he felt their fever. He died—three times over—in his little bed in the house on St. Paul street. When Paris had burned, he had screamed, had felt in in his very bones. He’d suffer and heal, year after year, and not have a clue as to why until news trickled across the sea with the spring thaw. Whatever it was, this connection had lasted only until the Quebec Act. Until Arthur made Quebec—made him—not French, but not exactly English. Just strung somewhere in between. It had worked, the pain had stopped, but the loneliest part of his life then began. Cut off from all three: brother, father and papa.

But he could feel it now again, horrible and familiar. The cut is still tied, but here, with French blood in his veins and only meters away, he can feel papa's pain in his own body. His own lungs feel numb even as the pieces slide up his throat. His belly is on fire, blood hot and swirling like petrol. The closer he gets, the higher the fire rises, passing from between his hips to the his bell to his chest, like boiling tar slowly filling him. Like a ship taking on water, he slows, sinks heavy into the mud. But the doesn’t stop. He can’t fucking stop. He finds the man he once called Papa face down in the mud.

He’s bleeding, white under the filth when Matt turns him over, and the dirt is wine-dark and rich with blood. By now, his vision is blurred colours and spots and whorls. It dances, doesn't give him a chance to get his bearings. But his heart is painful, its beat disturbed, irregular. His heart sends fire instead of blood to his limbs.

There is pain everywhere. Is this how it is for them to march to war so far from home? To become their soldiers rather than their cities? He pulls Francis up to his feet and then hauls him over his shoulder.

He is not as useful, smart or strong as Alfred. But he is strong enough for this. He wants so badly to stop, to shut down and die in the mud. But he doesn’t, he just heaves and struggles and doesn’t. Fucking. Stop. He hurls himself through the gas and its awkward going, but he moves. He makes it behind the front line and back, back, back.

He doesn’t stop until he finds an aid station. He collapses, lets Francis down as gently as ever. He goes to lay down himself, but the sheets are too clean for a man whose Papa has left a pool of blood down the back of his tunic. An orderly tries to push him down, but Francis’ torn belly takes precedence and Matt stumbles away towards a dispensary. He gets the bicarbonate and up-ends the jug of it over his head.

It's hot and disgusting, but the burning eases up again. It hurts like nothing before it, but he manages to stand and squint until his vision calms enough let him spot, amongst the hundreds of men, a muddied young nurse. She’s French, and eyes his British uniform warily, but his French is better than any Englishman’s and she takes his words to heart. He tells her to watch over Francis, but as the children of all the real nations do, all she hears is “Watch over your nation,”

He has to go.

As he walks away, he looks back. She sits by Francis’ side, holds his hand for a moment before she and the orderly get to work. Matt is almost happy he is half blind, so he doesn’t have to watch the affection in detail. She opens Francis’ belly and oh, god, Matt goes into full retreat, back to his men. Francis will kill them both if he stays here.

Leaving him is a physical relief, but it takes Matt back to a time before he was a man. When he was a boy who loathed the days after the goodbye at the pier. At the farewell itself, he was good; he didn’t cry. Just like Papa told him not to. But in the days after, in his silent little house at the edge of St. Paul’s street, he wept. He wept and shivered and sobbed. When the ship was out of sight, the crying began. It echoed behind him in the streets and then in the foyer and then in the bed. And oh the bed was horrible after Papa left. Huge and frozen without a broad chest to sleep against. He was so used to lonely, so used to cold, so used to not seeing many people and speaking to even less.

But with Papa came chatter and friendly faces and new things to the house. Books and candles and soft things they could not chop from the trees here. The townspeople were friendlier. A fatherless child was bad luck, but when Francis strolled down the street with his rich blue coat, Matt in hand, they smiled. They smiled at him.

But as he walks away, he is bad luck once again.

The road back to the front line is confusing and fraught. He’s still half blind. He feels his way forward through a the human wave of Frenchmen on the road. He is the only one headed in his direction. He hitches a ride on an artillery wagon but when the road diverges, he trudges along on foot. The French are a mass of misery, a storm of human suffering. Men in rows, each clutching the coat of the man in front of him, the column lead by a man clutching his bloodied arm. The French army in full retreat.

He pushed forward, struggling through as a swimmer against the current. Slowly, he makes it down his front lines. Behind them, all non-essential personnel had pushed right to the front or abandoned the trenchline completely. Every man with a pulse drawn forward to fight. He clambers down the ladder to the gunner’s nest, went to tap the gunner’s khaki shoulder.

“Which way to the thirty—”

The man's head falls back, his face black at the nose and mouth and eyelids, green foam seeping from the mouth and nose. He cries out, and falls backward.

He sees it, but he feels it more. The gunner— no, no, the boy. He's nineteen, from Manitoba. He was apprenticed to a baker, the baker's daughter wore his ring, he had dimples when he smiled and a mother who made some of the best pudding on the continent. Matt knew all that and more. That boy was his. That boys heart had stopped, and it had stopped in Matthew’s own chest.

He wipes viciously at his eyes, and takes the boys paybook and one of his tags, shoving it down into his pocket. He lays the boy down, covers his face with the coat he'd been wearing, and rolls down to take his place behind the gun.

The line beyond him is deserted. Over-extended and undermanned, this is as far as his men had managed to reclaim. He can’t see around the corner to his left, but in the mist beyond he can see grey German shadows darting around.

He turns the gun, aims over their heads. Fires a burst. Prays they will stop and turn back. They don’t. But their heads turn back round when Matt cuts their skulls from their throats with only a few seconds of pulled trigger. Turn back, he begs them silently. Don’t make me do this. But they don’t. They pause, stare at their mutilated comrade and push forth.

“Surrender, Englishman! We are not enemies!”

Matt’s reply tears him and three others into thirds.

“Hey, Hosenscheisser!” Matt feels his throat tearing as he screams into the green. Another head pops up out of the shell hole. He aims. “We’re Canadian!”

He fires.


	3. Sure of the Sun

  
  


* * *

 

HMS Sicilia

April 25th 1915

All around her, dead men walk.

She stands at the threshold of the hatch. Swallows. Tries to gauge the chaos before her.

Men standing huddled on the deck, wind-burnt, salt and sand clinging to their hair, their caps, their clothes. Few of them walk. Mostly they limp. Some crawl. All are helped along by their mates. Nurses and orderlies hand them their tea, bind wounds, haul crate after crate of blankets and bandages and morphine up from the hold. The sailors can only heave up one cot at a time but still it is so crowded that she can't quite do the math, can't count them anymore than she could the grains of sand in a handful. The sailors are keep bringing them up from the depths, heaving with callused hands at rope. It is supposed to be one man at a time, but the Australians cling together, and two or three huddle in the spaces made for one man to lie down.

"Where— where have they all—?" Zee mutters dimly to the closest person. Another nurse in a crisp headdress same as hers.

“Matron,” The English accent that corrects her is startling. A proper uptown Kensington English that doesn’t sound right coming from a woman when she is so used to dear Father’s corrections. Arthur’s always been fussy about it. “What?” Zee asks. Because she can’t comprehend the words when there is a boy Another stretcher drops at her feet. A boy with an Australian accent grabs her skirt and suddenly everything is quiet. The world burns down to one boy.

“You would do well to address your superiors with more respect!”

"Sorry Matron," Zee mutters.

"Sister—" The boy has handfuls of his shirt and she knows, she knows he’s nearly twenty but he’s got big eyes full of pain and— Oh god she is a sister. A nurse, yes. But a sister too. And her brother is one of them. A digger bleeding to death on the deck of a ship. The boy shudders and Zee kneels next to him, feeling through his clothes. There's no blood that she can see, but he's wearing so many clothes. She goes looking for the tag that should be attached to a button on his coat or pinned to his sleeve about what the bloody hell happened to him but as she shuffles through shirt, tunic, coat and blanket, she finds nothing. There is blood, she cannot find bandages or bullet hole. Shock? Shot? Where is the— It takes her a moment to push her thoughts into English past the panic. To make her mouth really move. But slowly it does.

"Private? Where are you hurt, private? Where can I help—” The boy jolts himself up onto his elbows, turns his head to her breast and vomits blood into the white of her apron, ashen faced. Zee falls back in shock. But no one who could help is looking, no one is paying a damn bit of mind. The boy reaches for her. Collapses. Goes still. She grasps for his throat, trying to feel something left in the vein and now the matron is suddenly at her side. "Sister Kirkland, he's dead. Come along—"

Zee stares at her. The boy isn't hers. He’s Australian, not a New Zealander. But his heart hasn't stopped in her chest but— he was alive! He was just alive. The Matron's eyes are flat, unperturbed, worn and callous. Was. The Matron's metal eyes say. He was alive. Now he is gone.

And that's it? She wants to cry out, slap the woman. But the Matron only frowns. He is gone like a bloody candle in the daylight. And the matron looks down at her: what's one more.

Another nurse pushes between them, cuts through the tension with a sweep of her hands. She doesn't have maroon stripes down her front, but her maroon hands the same authority. This is not the crisp British lady playing pretend in a nurse’s uniform, but a trained and true professional.

Absolute bedlam before them both. Stretchers and stretchers and stretchers, 10 rows deep, dozens more columns wide. From rail to rail, the entire deck is laid out and soldiers are looking to her, wide-eyed and eyes darting in the chaos. As the nurse, not the Matron bends over to opens the supply trunks, Zee stands. She’s shocked stupid at how many men are looking at her. They are looking at Zee like her face is calm in the eye of the storm and they call for her but she can’t hear them over the pounding of her heart in her ears. The sister is waving her maroon hand in Zee’s face, snapping for her attention, but there are so many. It takes another moment but Zee shakes herself, makes herself listen.

"Sister Kirkland! You're here. Good. We need another dressing station. Triage hemorrhages, chest and head wounds first, then limbs and sepsis. Watch for signs of gangrene and tag them for the theater sisters—"

"How are there so bloody many?" "Sister, we have hundreds of patients waiting and God knows how many more still in the boats. Do your job," she says, firm but imploring. The Australian sister leaves bloody fingerprints on the steel tray, the rolls of bandages, as shoves them into Zee’s arms. And then she is gone again. Zee watches her disappear into the crowd. She wants to walk like that. With purpose. Hold her head up high.

Her ribs shudder as if her corset is the only thing holding her bones together, but her hands are steady. She does her duty. She slops a pail of water between the cots, and then another and another until the slick blood has splashed beyond the railings and she can walk through the rows of bleeding men. She bandages, she pulls four dressing stations together into one until it works. Twice, the ropes that haul men up become unbalanced, and the stretchers flip hard to the left, sending more lives into the rough waters below. Sailor’s haul them up and she hammers air from her her own lungs into their mouths until they breathe again. The same phrases seem to steady them all. “Having quite the bluey with the Turk, aren’t we?” Gets her enthusiastic nods and responses of “Right-o, sister! Giving Johnny Turk the what-for!” And she laughs with them as she jabs surretts of morphine in their necks and thighs.

She spends sixteen hours on deck before a theater sister faints with exertion and Zee is called to take her place. She takes tea as she walks, holding a billy can between her teeth as she unzips her veil and replaces it with the surgical cap. 11 hours later, the sun has risen through the portholes.

A cot placed on the table before her. Thirty six hours now she's been in the theater. She stares at the tag. It reads: Cut gone gangrenous. Morphine administered. The surgeon cuts and Zee hands him his tools, sponges at blood, wraps his wounds.

Orderlies take the patient away.

She dips her hands in alcohol.

A stretcher is placed on the table. She reads the tags twisted round their buttons. Shrapnel to the head. No morphine. The surgeon cuts. She hands him his tools and sponges the blood. The boy is is torn wide-open at the temple, the bone has caved in like a lean-to and his brain shifts beneath. They sew him together. She wraps his head. Orderlies take the patient away.

She dips her hands in alcohol.

A new stretcher on the table. The leg mangled. She reads the tag twisted around his toe. His mangled toe at a eighty degree angle from his foot. Everything is gangrenous. She doesn’t need to read the tag. This boy is one of her own. He was a runner before the war. She swallows vomit. The surgeon does his work. She hands him his tools, sponges at blood, wraps stumps and places the wicker over them. Orderlies take him away.

She dips her hands in alcohol.

A stretcher is placed on the table. There is no tag. But he smells like father did when he’d visit her on his way home from China and she stops the surgeon from administering more morphine, though she does not see him or the arm torn right through, not really. She is hands and skill, no personality. Too tired. She hands the surgeon his tools, sponges blood, wraps his wounds. Orderlies take him away.

She dips her hands in alcohol.

Another stretcher is placed on the table. She reads the red tag around his neck because his shirt is gone. Gunshot wound to chest. Bullet not located. No morphine. The surgeon calls over the anesthetist and the white linen sphere is placed over his face, drops of ether one at a time as she hands the surgeon a scalpel and readies a gauze sponge. The linen netting lifts. She sees his face.

She sees his face.

“Sponge, sister,”

Her vision arrows to pinpricks.

“Sister?”

He's pale and damp and thin, his expression cut with pain. He’s wedged and sweating and pale like an Englishman or a wedge of cheese left in his outback sun. He's her brother. He's Jack.

“You alright, sister?”

“Fine,” she mutters faintly. She hands him the sponge. “I’m just fine. Thank you, doctor,”

“Major,” he corrects her, sharply. “When will you bloody nurses learn some discipline,”

She glances at the clock. At the chalk wall of its endless tally marks of patients.

“How long have you been on shift?”

“Only since four,” She hears herself say, but somehow her will has left her body.

“That was yesterday,” the Major says. She can’t remember his name.

“Right,” Zee mutters something else, her hands on Jack’s forehead, in his ruddy hair. She hands the Major the scalpel and the sponge and he cuts and oh— oh no. The skin of his chest opens like a bird spreading its wings. The surgeon pushes her away before she even catches her breath.

“I won’t make you watch me finish cut your brother open,” he says kindly, like he’s gifting her the grail. “Go have a lie down. I’ll finish up here,”

She needs to sleep but she can’t lay down yet. So she sits outside, toes the rivets of the steel floor. When the orderlies carry him out it feels as though it's been days. Jack is conscious. Her vision is grey as she takes his hand.

“Hey sis,” He grinned a pale shadow of his usual smile up at her. A swell of fondness pushed up through her chest and she mirrors his sunbeam of a smile like the sea did. The hand on his bad side rose, as if to prod at his wounds, but he grimaced. “The bloody hell happened?"

She reads the tag and it's in in her own handwriting. She doesn’t remember writing it.

“Gunshot wound. Your lung collapsed in surgery. Can you… just take a deep breath? Like this?”

“No,” he said.. She glared. He wheezed out a puff of air.

“You’ll be okay,” She mutters. She tries to rally herself, tries to cuff him gently on the shoulder. He grabs her hand halfway through. She can’t— stand. Her vision went grey.

He mutters. She laughs until she cries. She cries until she sleeps, tucked around him, any shore of him she can reach, any piece of him she can protect from the world.

In the morning, she unfolds herself from his side, lifts up the edge under the bandages. Everything is almost fine, pink scar tissue nearly knit together over where there had been a bullet hole and incision. He’s pale, but his breath and pulse are steady. She tucks the covers back around him in, ducks under the judgemental glare of the ward sister and escapes to the ships chapel. When she’s sure she’s alone, she prays.

"Why are we here, Lord?" She kneels before the cross in the ship's chapel, her chin above the tips of her hands flush together, kneeling prostrate before the cross. "Please tell me this has a purpose,"

From God there, silence. And from the hallway, the mortal echoes of the operating room. The mortal Australian corporal's screams because they've run out of chloroform again. The mortal thunder of distant explosions swallowed and dulled by the sea. The guns as they land on the cove. The mortal creaking of this great, floating tin can that she lives on as it lists to the left. She has seen good, and she has seen evil— seen it on the wards in piles severed limbs and septic lives. But she has never seen God. The ship rights itself and she hardly notices.

"Why do they suffer?" The mortal silence of her own voice cracks.

"For us," And the silence breaks-. She snaps up right. No. It isn't God. She feels prickly, warm because for a moment, she had believed that it was.

It's her brother.

Jack walks stiffly through the doorway, arm held loosely at his chest in its sling. She can feel the effort it must take to move. He was shot before they’d even landed, cut down in the water.

"Didn't mean to startle you, kiwi-bird,” He's pale, sadness etched in every new worry line on his face. "Good thing you wee kiwis are flightless.” he smiles, thinly. "Jumped so high I thought you'd fly right back to New Zealand,"

She can't help herself, she grins over her shoulder at him and watches as he drops wearily into the pew. The convalescent’s pajamas he wears look too much like prison stripes against the steel that he sits on. She wants to wrap him up in Australia's summers. Take him home to the continent that shares his name. She wants it so much that for a moment that she doesn’t hear what he says.

“What?” she asks. He looks solemn. Never a good sign on his face.

“That they’re suffering for us,” he says.

“That's blasphemy.” she snaps. Honestly, between her father’s loathing of his own church and her brother— the Kirkland clan could drive a Methodist to drink.

Jack shrugs a weary shoulder.“You’re the one begging God for answers, kiwi-bird,”

“You don't get to comment when you don’t believe in God to begin with,” she said tartly. He’s always been a little too fond of that Darwin bloke despite being a continent country entirely made up of biological exception.

“I believe in Him plenty.” Jack says softly. “He’s the one who’s never got time for the poor buggers down here,”

“He—” She goes to give him a proper lesson in the whole thing but he’s gone and cut her off again.

“Two thousand years and and the old shepherd's yet to muster his errant flock,” He jabs a thumb over his shoulder at the distant hum of misery from the the wards. She can almost ignore it now— and it’s only been a day. A day, and he's having a go at her.

She straightens her cuffs and looks at him sharply, but he doesn't notice. He's staring somewhere else.The irony of his middle name was lost on their father, and on nobody else. She opens her mouth, her brow furrowed and he shakes himself aware again as if the pain has lessened.

“Oh don’t go and start a bluey,” He shakes himself aware again, as if he was lost in the pain for a moment and she can’t blame him. It take more of her than she’d admit to suppress the pain there. Each heart that stops, stops in her own chest, and it is worse with them dying in cots just down the hall. He nudges her with his good arm. “That wasn’t the point,”

“Then what was the point?”

“That they’re suffering for us, Kiwi-bird. You and me and Dad,” He says it like it's obvious. He says it like it's inevitable.

She jabs her chin at him. "No."

“No?"

She glares down the hall at the ward, at him in his sling. “This, Jack. What this war is doing to them. This is Evil.” She knows he's seen it too. But he keeps on shaking his bloody head.

“These men that you're nursing," he says. "They're here because Dad failed at diplomacy. And they’re wounded because there are machine guns on the cliffs we haven’t yet figured out how to take. Not. You know. God.” He gestured vaguely upward.

And she swallows because oh, hasn’t she her own doubts? God’s thunder is in the distance, but there’s no word from him. His lightning just there in the portholes, it’s not just the natural crash but a sound— a syllable ordaining his will.

“Well no, you wouldn’t see it as them dying for God. You don’t believe in God,”

“Didn’t I just say I did?”

“I—”

“Because I do, Kiwi-bird. He made the plants and the animals and the earth. The boomers and Botany Bay. I don't have a better explanation than God for all the beauty in the world.” He taps her chin and gives her a weary smile. “And he did mighty fine work with the fat baby birds, didn’t he? I just don’t think he gives a shit about the rest.” Jack laughs, and scoops her close with his good arm. “Oh Kiwi-bird, the bible really does have you by the bollocks doesn’t it?”

He buries his nose in the hairline that poked out from under her veil and holds her close. Affection comes easy for Jack, it always has. Zee returns the hug, hid her face in the scratchy fabric of his shirt, and figures she could forgive him.

“I haven’t got bollocks,” she mutters, because she couldn’t think of anything to say. God— he's up there somewhere. She just wishes he would look down just a little more often.

“Now that,” Jack says, and his voice dips low and unusually sincere. “Is something we can both be grateful for. Keeps you safe, in more ways than one.”

“Yes, well. That's not fair to you, is it?” she frowns. “We should both be in uniform. Since we are the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps. ”

“Well we are! Aren’t we?” He tugs at her grey serge sleeve.

“I mean in khaki, you barmy clod,”

“Wouldn’t suit ya,” He nods and his chin comes to a rest on the top of her forehead. “Besides, I couldn’t do my bit if you were too close,”

He hadn’t even managed to make it to the cove by himself.

“Maybe not,” She says. But they should be in this together. Back to back, coast to coast. “But you know…”

“Hmm?” He hums, questioning.

“You’re half right,” she mutters, staring at the cross.

“About what?”

“God,” she says. “He made all the beautiful things,”

“That he did,” There’s a nod up at the cross and for once they’re looking at the same thing.

“But they’re not suffering for God,” she says.

“Yeah, they’re suffering for—”

“No,” she says over him. “No they’re not. I’ve seen what this means to real people,”

“No you haven’t, you haven’t been home.”

“Neither have you!” she retorts.

He huffs. “But you can’t tell me you don’t feel what they feel when they hear Gallipoli—”

“Going off of what they read in the paper! But out there—”

“Out there, we’re standing tough!" Jack frowns. "Making a name for ourselves! As people. Not just bloody Kirklands three and four. We get to look the world in the eye and—”

“And what about the men out there? The ones who are DYING. Are you going to look them in the eye and tell them it was worth it just so you can shove your name in Father’s face?" She stares at him, her ears hot beneath her veil. "I have lost two hundred and forty three patients in less than a day. And you damn well know what it feels like because most of them were yours. You haven’t seen a bloody thing!”

“No but if someone has to do it—”

“Then it should have been Dad to begin with! Not you! Not yours! Do you have a clue what it was like not knowing where you were? How you were faring? And then you pass under my hands with a butchered lung— and it's not right!”

“Zee!”

“So don’t you sit there, John Christian Kirkland, all glib about me and glory and God! Because I have seen this suffering and it's not bloody redeeming us now! There’s no ascension when they dump the bodies overboard. Making a name for—it’s not a blasted cricket match! You don't even know—”

“Well I’m about to find out, aren’t I?” He spits the words like he's meaning them to be vicious, but Jack being Jack, they fall flat. From his pocket, he produces a note. She doesn’t need to read it.

“No!” she says. “They can’t send you back—”

“I’m sorry, kiwi-bird.”

“Absolutely not. They can’t have you again—”

“Yeah they can." he slumps forward with his one-good-armed shrug. " They can send me wherever they want."

“Jack you just got off the bloody ward. And I can get the M.O. to reverse it—"

“They’re going to send me somewhere. And I’d rather it be where I can make a difference. That maybe when this is all over, and the Pommies and Dad have some idea of what we can do for king and country— they’ll give a bit, eh? Maybe the next time we'll get to choose over where we fight. How we fight. But you and me," he sighs, rubbing the back of his neck. He is plaintive. This is a Jack she is not used to seeing. "I don't want us to fight. I can’t go knowing you’re cross with me.”

“It's not you I'm bloody cross with–" she snaps. It's a lie. "Or I wouldn't be if you would just let me help—"

“Zee, I’ve known you since we were wee. I know you can stop whatever the bloody hell you want to stop. Figure out how to get what you want by force or by tugging on Dad’s ear 'til he listens. I— I don’t have that.” he says. "And it’s okay, Kiwi-bird. I know what you mean. Just… do you know what I mean? That this is a chance to show what I’m made of. To look Dad in the eye and say I won this for him and for us? I’ve never had that. I don’t know if I’ll get another. So please, Zee. Let me go. I want to be a part of this. I want to see this through.”

"Do you know what I want?" she demands, low, and her hands balled up at her sides. "I want to get through this with your head still on your shoulders!”

He smiles at her wanly. "Not like they can kill me."

“No!" she says. "But they will send you back to me in pieces. I have a Tommy on the infectious disease ward. Rheumatic fever, but he’s well enough he can sneak into the mess and steal whiskey! He sits there and he drinks, and he tells me about how he sat on a Turks chest and slit his throat! He looks me in the eye and he tells me about his mate’s guts in his hands, Jack! And it’s been a day! Not even a forty-eight hours since the landings." Like she hasn't held them herself. Hasn't tried to put things back where they belong. "That Tommy he’s… not right." Her breath hitches. "His soul isn’t in that body anymore. And you know just as well as I do that madness may just trample us—the way it runs through this family." She looks across the row of empty pews.

"Father’s been half mad as long as I’ve known him. And you were sitting on the bed with a bottle of grog just— putting it away and you— Blast it Jack!" she forces herself to breathe again. Breathe. "You looked just like him.”

“Oh,” he says, voice flat. God's silence fills the chapel once again and all that's left is the everyday tragedies, just down the hall. Jack shrinks into himself. “Christ Zee, I was drinking because it hurts,”

“And you think Father doesn’t?”

“Yeah well, I’m not him!”

“No! No, you’re not!" she says. "But you may as well be if I let you go back there. You won’t come back the same.”

“And what if I come back for the better?” Oh God, if He's still listening to them row. God, why does he have to be so stubborn? “What if I want to come back better for this? With a bit of actual fucking pride to me! Maybe a scar or two to show off to the lads. I want to come out of this a little worldlier!”

“You’re going to come out of it with nothing you went into it with! Please— Jack please don’t go back." Well if nothing else, he's taken aback by the word. Plaintive as it is. She says it with everything she has, gives it a bit of a lioness’ bite with her teeth. "Stay out of it. I can stitch you back up, I can hold you, I can even put you back together if you make me but please, please don’t make me watch you turn into Father. Please,”

“Zee,” he whispers and his voice is wrecked, sorrow-thickened into a painful scrape. “Please don’t tell me you think that fucking little of me. That you don’t actually think one war would send me spiraling that deep—”

“I don’t know, Jack! I don’t have a clue what half the madmen on this boat were like before they landed! I don’t know what Father was like before— But I know you! I have known you my whole life. I know you cry when you save animals and they die anyway. I know you can’t even stand to kill spiders when you could just put them outside. How the hell do you expect me to believe you’ll come back the same from fighting and killing men?"

“I don't know!” He levels her with as fierce as look as it came with him. “But I’m not going to sit down while my mates do all the work! I’ve got my orders, Zee. Will you quit fighting that? We’ve got so much fighting to do— and I don’t want to do against you.”

Her hands are buried halfway in her apron now, her hands as stiff as Iron Tree wood, unsure of whether she wants to shake him, or to plant them on both sides of his stupid face and beg him to stay. In that moment, all she wants to see her brother smile again. His lopsided, rakish diggers smile, the one that promises both the sorrow of a Digger’s song and the release of the iron chains and the pride in the freedom he’s held so dear. The mountains and the valleys, the rock, the sky— He’s a continent.

She is the island.

She leads them through the night but he packs the power behind every step they take. They should be fighting together. But he isn’t wrong. There's fighting to do. It won't be with her.

“Will you at least… stay for a bit?”she asks. “Be my brother for a little longer. Before you go selling your soul for a commendation."

He hesitates. “I’m leaving with the first transport tomorrow morning,”

“That’s fine." she says. It's enough. "I’ll get some rum. And you can teach me that song—" she loosens her grip and doesn't'’ fall apart. "What was it? The one the band played when we set sail from Alexandria? Walking Maud?”

Jack snorts. “It’s Waltzing Matilda, Kiwi-bird. The band played Waltzing Matilda,”

She sends him back to bed, doesn’t tell him the ship is steaming away from the cove, because they are full of casualties already and other hospital ships will have to take on the wounded. Between his wild hair and the way he turns three times before he settles, he looks like a wounded dingo going to ground. She exists her shift and walks a full bottle of rum from the officer’s mess. Dumps some tea on top of it into the billy for good measure. A surgeon, a captain so-and-so she can’t recall the name of, stops her as she approaches the door.

“Sister," he nods, eyeing the teapot. "What have you got?"

“My fair share,” she says mildly. She figures God would understand; it isn’t stealing if she’s just taking the rum rations she’s been denying herself all in one go. The captain looks at her, he thinks, and Zee blinks at him, just wide-eyed and slowly enough to still her racing heart.

And then he straightens his shoulders, fixing her with an understanding look. “On your way, then. Sister.” He waves her off. She heaves a sigh. So, she's Arthur’s daughter after all. Around the corner, out of eye shot from the officer, she falls against the steel wall. It was easy, almost, and somehow that worries her more. She makes her way up onto the deck. Jack is already up there, the sling and bandages gone. He’s buttoned into a new wool tunic and for once, he’s buttoned it up properly, not a buttons or collar askew, nor a tab. He looks so neat, and so well that she almost wishes him ill again. Anything so he can stay. But she accepts his hug and banishes the thought from her mind.

They stretch out on a blanket on deck, and most of that ends up twisted around Jack. The dip in temperature finally lets Zee relax but her sunbaked brother shivers. But by the time they’re halfway through the grog, he’s relaxed around her, slumping against the steel wall at their backs, his head resting on her arm. He’s still pale in the gloom but steadier and more whole with each passing moment. When he said he’d be fine to get on the transport, he was right. She wrings her hands as they drink in silence, sits kneeling, perched like songbird on her corner of the blanket.

"What odd times we occupy,” she says because it’s something to say that isn’t “Please don’t go,” or even worse, “Please come back,”

“That right?” Jack said, and his voice is distant. He staring high above her at the stars and there are so many of them.

She nods. “We've got lorries, but most people still use mules. Telephones and sky scrapers for us while other people still live as if it's the middle ages,”

Jack laughs, taking another sip of the rum-laced tea. “What would _you_ know what living in the middle ages is like? Even Matt's an ankle biter compared to the rest of Europe.”

“Unlike you, some of us listen to father,” she says. Not in the lessons perhaps, but the stories.

Jack ruffles her hair. “Some of use have never heard Dad say anything worth listening too. But I reckon ya have have yourself a point there, Kiwi-bird,” He looks thoughtful. “We’re fucken young,”

She almost laughs because God, is he right— but he's wearing the least common of his expressions. Serious and almost reverent. He stares beyond the relative calm of their immediate waters, to the horizon that flashes yellow and gold, lit up like sunrise for a second before the volley of naval artillery silences.

“We’re going to make something new in the world, you and me,” she says.

Jack nods. "You're a shit,"

"At least I'm not full of it,"

"So full of it your eyes are brown,"

"Oh so yours are green because you're so full of piss?"

“Don’t forget the vinegar!” He snorts. The laughter explodes from his mouth. He flops over on top of her. His arms snake around her in a hug but being pinned into the steel by him is like being trapped under a painter's easel, all hard angles and weight in all the wrong places. He buries his head in her belly and shifts so she didn't have to roll out from under him.

"You always were a cuddly fuck," she sighs.

"That’s mighty profane for the fat little kiwi bird. What next? You talking lord’s name in vain?" He chuckles.

"I'm not fat!"

"Round as a rugby ball, sis."

She huffs and he gently pinched her cheek. "Rosie round as a rose hip," He teases—her middle name has always been a favorite of his.

"Are you drunk already?" she asks. "It usually takes a bottle or two before you're nostalgic,"

"Nah," He says. Makes a face like he’s confused “I’m just a bit up the bloody gum tree looking at this sky you get any astrology at your fancy lady finishing school?"

"Astronomy,” She corrects him. “Why?"

"I don't see a bloody constellation I know."

"Want me to tell you them?"

"Please,"

She raises her hand to the faint triangle in the distance, stars flickering like bits of jewels in the faint lantern light of the sliver of silver moon. She pointed her fingers into the shape of a beak.

"That's the eagle. They call him—” The Latin word, Aquila sticks in her throat and she can't finish. That is not what her people used to call the eagle. "That's ‘Poukai.’" She ignores her brother's quizzical look. "He swoops low with his massive wings and!" she snaps her hand down, pinches his nose. Jack jumped magnificently, at least an inch off the deck, sends them both into the air. "He swallows _whole_ the silly children who can't focus on their lessons!" Zee cackles.

"I'm bloody grown!" Jack laughs, his eyebrows scrunched together indignantly.

She rolls her eyes at him. "That grey one there. They call him Mangōroa i ata, the long shark of the early dawn, who gave birth to all the stars in the Milky Way,"

From one horizon to the other, she orates her history in the stars. In her own words The little pulsing red one? Matawhero. The larger brown flickering star? Rangawhenua. She points to Ophiuchus and tells him about Kupe the navigator, who brought her first peoples to her Islands and who destroyed Te Wheke-a-Muturangi the great octopus whose shape is still there in the sky. Jack sits rapt, listening to her weave her stories, heroes and gods on the warp threads and ancient monsters in the weft.

She pauses to take a sip of tea, staring up at the pieces of the Greek Argo as the great canoe Aotea.

"Well, won't Dad be impressed when I can point all the stars." Jack says in a whisper. "Those blokes in the bedsheets really could tell stories, eh?"

The tea does not go down, but swells inside of her: an acid, ugly anger rising in her throat. No! She wants to snap at him. They're not father's stories—they're mine! Well, no, they... aren’t are they? Her own are so far south, the night skies of two different hemispheres as different as their outlooks on the world. But she’d planted her own mythology on the constellations of these northern skies and those are hers! She wants to tell him. But she swallows it, buries her face in his chest, and holds him as tightly as her arms will let her.

“Zee!" he mutters, his voice taut. "Hey! What’s—”

“Don’t die,” she says. Because she can’t say “Don’t go where I can’t follow,” So for once, she lets him hear the sob that bubbles in her chest. “God, please don’t fucking die,”

“I won’t! I won't. I promise!” He says easily but how can he promise her that? They’ve lowered so many bodies overboard today. So many dead. He's come back before. From the wound. From the shelling. From smallpox, and every miserable fucking way that men die. But it never feels any easier for it. She blinks back tears and wriggles until he holds her. He’s got no goddamn right being so big but she hopes that strength is enough to carry him back. He's her only brother. Her only damn brother. Whatever other sons their father had before them, they've no more claim on their kinship than they have the moon.

“You’ve cursed more this afternoon tea than you have in the last ten years, Kiwi-bird,” Jack says softly, gently. “Not like you to be scared,”

“Not like you to be stupid,” She shoots back, but then she hears the rumble of laughter in his chest.

He snorts. “Like you haven’t been telling me I'm a nong since you learned how to speak.” And well there goes the fear in a tremor of laughter.

She half claps, half smacks him on the good arm as their laughter dies down. “We’re going to be all right, aren’t we,” she says, but it's not a question. He’ll be fine.

“She’ll be apples, mate,” He ruffles her curls. More rum, more rumination. But for the first time since she last slept, Zee is at ease. She believes him. Right there on the cold deck floor under the stars because he can’t be seen in the nurses quarters and she's not going to bloody well lead him.

The rise and fall of his chest lulls her to sleep like the rock-rest rhythm of the waves have all of her life.

She dreams.

In her dream they are small, in a time before confederation, before half her people could even vote— her brother head and shoulders above her but gangly still. Barefoot and half covered in mud, Jack the beanstalk, crooked and awkward with oversized puppy paws for feet. She races him down to the creek in her chemise, wades down to where the water is cold under the shade of the billabong and gum trees. She hurls a glob of mud across his face. And Jack has the gall to look shocked for a moment, and only a moment before he’s barreling into her and they're both in the murky water, giggling. His voice cuts away then. The cicadas and heat. And the sky's more blue than she remembered—too blue. There’s a star shaped cavern where Jack’s forehead used to be.

She wakes with a gasp. Rolls away and is on her feet and below deck before Jack can get his bearings. Hands on her face, hands wringing her apron, hands a flurry around her. No, no. They'd played in the creek that day. Jack had shot them a good dinner and they’d spent the night huddled around the fire, him telling stories and her telling him he was full of sheepshit. That was how it had gone.

That was how it had gone. She stares into the dark and the gaping blast wound in her brother's face stares back at her.

By the time she opens her eyes again, she's leaving the ward with a pair of stolen scissors in her hand, standing in front of the mirror where the only face she can see is her own. And slowly the pins come out. She unfolds her veil and it drops to the floor like a seabird shot from the sky by something unholy. Then the combs from where she has them pinning her hair where its thickest around her temples. Two of them, polished wood and inlaid with mother of pearl. Flecks of white shell that flicker silver and opaque in the form of flowers. One and a half each. She puts them together and traces the shape of a feather that forms. The feathers were men's ornaments once. The hair is hers, precious, a thing that her father has never quite taught her to tame, and which her father can't have.

And then there is her brother. Jack, like some daguerreotype of an English urchin with a grin as bright as his sun. He’d come to her shores before even father, hungry and haunted but grinning. Grinning, grinning grinning. He’d mistaken the koromiko flowers in her hair for English flowers and dubbed her Rose, then Rosie, then Zee. That very first day he plucked her up skyward on his thin shoulders, and she had fed him all the fish he could eat for his troubles. He called her his sister and she flicked him on the nose and called him shithead and voila. She hardly remembers life before him. Life without him, she does not have the imagination to conjure.

She puts down the combs and picks up the scissors.

As a girl, she'd watched men have their hair cut. Captured men kneeling, the victor shaving their heads to show to all the clans and all the world that their authority was lost, their prestige gone with the locks down the river. She thinks of Jack, who has never had long hair at all. He’s never had that prestige to begin with. She is a different story, but she does not cry as her black curls fall to the steel floor.

She takes a drink from the rum bottle, then another and by the time the rum is gone she is finished. Her hair is gone quick as the drink. She plucks a lock of it from the floor, one neat little spiral and it goes with the letter to her father. She folds away the skirts, the corset she's never really needed, buttons the tunic over her suspenders and trousers. She takes the last dregs of the drink.

You are doing this for your brother, she tells herself and she opens the porthole and tosses all of it into the water below. Stoops, sweeps, and sends her hair tumbling back into the sea. God.

Father is going to kill her. He might actually hang her for this. And she loves him. But this is Jack. She crossed the Tasman sea to be his sister: she can cross the fucking Bosphorus. Her brick-built older brother who cried when his koala had croaked, who'd made her a crown of grass and mud mockery of a Yorkshire pudding when he had nothing else to give her, who'd hid her in his broom closet when father had come looking for her during the last war between the Maori and the Pakeha. Jack who has been her only friend, her only equal since her birth.

Father had told her to stay away. Her brother was a good-for-nothing convict transport of muddied Irish blood and nothing good would come of him. He’d boxed her ears and had him flogged for every crossing of the sea between them. But they missed each other more than they'd ever feared him. If anything of her came from something other than her people, it came from her brother. The happiest memories she had since the English set foot on her shores.

On other shores she has another brother she knows only by nervous whispers; and sometimes she wondered what Arthur would have done to Alfred if he'd won the war. How he would have remade what was left of him. He could do that to her. Her father is a man, but he is an empire. A man whose sea power even Tangaroa might have envied, with a navy that linked them all to him, like a necklace, a chain of silvery sea routes. He calls her the rose of his English gardens when he's in his better moods, but he's never been shy about making sure she knows he can wash her away like the very tide. If she's to drown for anything, she'll do it for Jack. Her first act of rebellion had been loving her family. It is fitting that her last one might be to join him on foreign shores.

She ducks out of her cabin and makes her way on deck, conjures her voice from somewhere deeper in her chest as she hollers to the winchman. “When does the transport leave?”

He ignores her. Good to know men ignore her as a private in trousers as easily as they do an officer in a skirt. She snaps her fingers in his face, plucks the flask from his hands and keeps her voice low.

“The bloody fuck d’ya think you are?” he snarls indignantly.

“The transport. When does it leave!?”

“You missed it ya daft sod.” the winchman hisses, gruffly trying to pry the drink out of her hands. She shoves it back into his scraggly, outstretched fingers and throws herself against the landing. The little transport boat bobs in the water half a rugby pitch away. She backs away to prove that maybe she isn't as mad as she's about to prove herself to be. But like fuck is she turning her back on him now. She has barely enough time to form her body into the diver’s arrow before she hits the water. Arms up above her head, lungs full of air until they're bursting like swim bladders—legs straight, toes pointed. She strikes the water like a seabird and curves until she's angled back up and popped through the black surface like a fucking cork. The ship is only a few feet away and she calls out, catches how high her voice sounds at a shout, coughs and calls again. Somebody sees her down in the water. They slow down and she paddles for them, parting the water in front of her with her hands and propelling herself forward with her powerful legs as her wet clothes try to pull her down..

They haul her in, three sets of arms. “Bloody oath!” she hears and then she’s nearly dropped back into the water.

“Oh fuck me dead!” Ah,yes. There’s Jack.

The petty officer laughs as they toss her into the boat. “Miss the transport, did ya lad?” Jack’s staring at her, a look that on another man she'd call glaring daggers. But he doesn't have the face or the disposition to frighten a gull.

“Couldn’t let my mates do all the work could I?” She laughs nervously, with a smile that doesn't quite reach up to her eyes. Jack stares at her, and she stares back at him, solemnly pleading. Someone tosses a blanket over her shoulder and then he’s got her by the collar at the rear of the boat.

“Have ya gone totally troppo?” he hisses. The brogue of his accent his thicker now the syllables clipped with anger and concern.

“Have I— what?”

“Have ya lost yer fucken mind? What the bloody christ are ya doing here?” He shakes her. She realizes then, that it's his hands that are shaking, still clutching her tunic.

"You are—" His nostrils flare. He flicks one of her waterlogged curls. “Bloody hell what have ye done to yer hair!?”

“Cut it." she says. Like he's ever been able to stop her before. She lifts her chin, looks him in the eye. “We are the Anzac Corps, aren’t we?”

He lets go, his hands tensed and fluttering like angry shore birds. “You have no fucking idea what this war is."

“Neither have you!” She spits back. His ribs are healed and good as new, but she feels the puncture in his pride just then. “You didn’t even make it up the beach. And I told you! I told you I'm not sending you back there all by yourself—"

“Oh well isn't that bloody wonderful. And what fucken _use_ are ya going to be against a fucking machine gun—”

“Just as much as you." she says. And he is livid in the dark. He pulls her closer, words like grains between his teeth.

“Do you know what the Krauts did to the pommie lasses in Belgium?" he hisses.

She nods at him. “They were nurses, Jack. And they shot them anyway." As hard as she tries, she can't get her teeth to stop chattering in the cold. "I won’t sit back and die on that tin can when the torpedo it. If I’m going to die, it’s going to be next to you where I belong. Two lines." she says, voice failing her. "Two lines in our cross."

“Ye’ve gone mad. Completely fucken mad,” He shakes his head. “Dad is going to kill you and put a bullet in my skull for good measure when he's done.”

“And you think I'd let him!?"

“That’s not up to you—!”

She looks up at him, watches him trying to steel himself again. “I’m here. We’re going together. And that’s the end of it,”

“Zee, Jesus, don't do this to me." he says. "If anything happens to ya, the old man can bloody have me. Because I won't forgive myself."

“I've made my choice.”

“You don’t get to bloody make that call,”

“We are doing this together, Jack.”

He doesn’t respond, but looks beyond her even as he pulls her tight to his side as the transport cruises along towards the beach, the muzzle flash of rifles cracking bright on the shore when she dares peer over. She swallows.

There has been no sweeter pleasure in her life than a day at the beach. One in particular she recalls from the earliest dawn of this century. She woke early in the morning, squinting up at the sky through the missionary's windows and squinting at the hazy margins in the distance that promised a scorching summer day and suddenly the urge to go back to sleep was gone from her bones. She'd tucked a blanket into a basket and breakfast wrapped in a napkin and took off so early the missionary's wife wasn't even awake.

Tearing down the hill to the little bay, her heart beating in a fierce anticipation as her green hills roll, hopping across the excruciatingly hot sand until she could toss her blanket down, tear off her dress and leap into the surf.

Water! Half submerged with the great green mystery of the aquarian world beneath her, at one with it the way only island nations are. She was something between fish, fowl and biped out here. Still as round as own kiwi bird but pushing through the water like a dolphin. Everything submerged seemed safe from view, down there where no sailor could happen upon it. The rest of her was exposed to a sun that passed overhead and west, to where her brother's land rested in the distance.

And there he was on the beach, Lord Father in only his shirtsleeves, wearing the face that so wanted to scold her, to tell her to put on some blasted clothes. But she's still wearing her dress and swimming in the reverse stroke he taught her. He abandoned his scowl like he did his heavy coat and he waded in after her. He couldn't even pretend to scold her when the soothing riffs of breakers and the rock-rest call of the waves sang to him same they did to her.

They didn't speak much, but they raced through the waves. She beat him twice and he dragged her under on the third race, rather than let her best him again. They emerge, lungs bursting with laughter as much as the need for breath. She circled him like a guppy as he floated in place. A man, a cork, a small island bobbing in the water.

It was easiest to be his daughter at the beach. Sometimes she thought it was the water, the wellspring a month's journey between them that had given them life. Sometimes her father's sentimental fondness for his only daughter. Whichever it was, between water and sky, she could allow her mind to go blank. When they got hungry and remembered their land legs they dragged themselves out of the water. With little hands she unpacked her basket of toast and fish and chips and they ate their hearts out, messy as they pleased. His love of manners second to the love of a meal, it seemed. He didn't have her mind her manners or scold her for her calves showing to the sun. He let her snooze full-bellied in the hot sand, and she woke up to him red as a boiled lobster beside her. And they would go out into the water once more.

When he spoke to her, it was this. Lord Byron's words rather than his own. “There is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea there is music in it's roar. I love my father none the less, but nature more. For there is only rapture on the lonely shore,”

And on the boat with her brother and two other men, feeling it slow on the water— she knows the rapture by name. It is not the kind her father found in the sea. Not the kind lovers share. But the biblical kind: the Book of Raptures. The very end of the world.


End file.
